The most effective legal advice rarely arrives at the end of a process. Pedro Campagnac, Head of Legal at Indie Campers, examines why modern GCs must combine operational efficiency with the judgment and trust needed to influence decisions early.
In what ways do you see the role of the GC changing over the next 5-10 years?
I see two shifts, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is about volume. Businesses are more regulated, more international and faster-moving than the headcount of any in-house team can match. A GC at a growing company cannot solve that by hiring because the maths does not work. So, the role is becoming increasingly about building better processes, better tools, and integrating AI for the repetitive parts of contract review, research and drafting. I spend real time on this now, and I expect that to grow.
The second is about judgement. The more the routine work becomes automated, the more the GC’s value concentrates in what a model cannot do: reading a situation (or reading the room), weighing commercial against legal risk, and being the person the CEO trusts when the answer is in no rulebook. In short, the GC of the next decade will run a leaner function with better tools and will be measured less on legal output than on judgement. The technical floor rises and the human ceiling is where the role lives.
How do you foster innovation and agility within your legal team?
Pragmatically, not as a slogan.
Three things matter to me. First, matching work to people. A small team only works if you know each person’s strengths and route work accordingly. I have very frequent 1:1 alignments with each team member, to discuss where they feel most comfortable and which topics make them more anxious. Getting people to work on what they enjoy is half the way to getting them working on what they do best. And of course, the contentious matters, the contract-heavy work and the same-day turnarounds do not all go to the same person. Forcing everyone to do everything is how a lean team breaks.
Second is all about removing friction: templates for what repeats, daily kick-offs to triage the urgent from the non-urgent, and a low tolerance for process that survives only out of habit.
The third one, growing more and more in importance: tools. Everyone says they are adopting AI, but we are studying it to become power users. We currently use it for the parts of the work where it genuinely helps, such as first-pass review, research and document production, freeing the team for the calls that actually need a lawyer. But there is more to it, and we are always looking to see where we can create automations and gain efficiencies. I am learning these tools alongside the team rather than mandating them from above. Agility, for me, is less about being clever than about being deliberate: knowing what only a lawyer can do, and getting everything else out of the way.
What qualities do you believe distinguish truly impactful GCs from good ones?
A good GC gives correct answers. An impactful one helps the business make decisions.
The difference usually comes down to three things.
The first is separating the legal question from the commercial one, and being honest about which is which. Plenty of “legal risks” are business decisions in disguise, and a GC who hands the board a clean choice, with the real risk named and quantified, is worth more than one who retreats into caveats.
The second is knowing the business well enough to be early. Advice that arrives at the end of a process can only validate or block. Advice that arrives at the start can shape the deal. Legal has to be part of the product creation process: I call it Legal Business Development.
The third is trust, which is unglamorous and hard to fake. It is built by being consistent, by staying calm when things go wrong and by being the person who tells the CEO the uncomfortable thing before it becomes a problem. It is with judgement and trust that you earn a real voice in the organisation.
If you could change one perception about the in-house legal profession, what would it be?
That in-house is the quieter, less demanding side of the profession, the place lawyers go to slow down.
The opposite has been true for me. A GC at a company operating across several jurisdictions handles a wider range of problems, at higher speed, than most specialists in private practice: commercial, regulatory, disputes, M&A and the occasional crisis, often in the same week and in legal systems you did not train in. You rarely get to spend months going deep on one question. You have to be right enough, fast enough, across all of them and then own the consequences.
I would retire the idea that the interesting law happens in firms, and the in-house lawyer simply implements it. In a fast-growing company the in-house team is often where the hardest and most novel questions land first, because the business gets there before the precedents do.
